Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Every time someone mentions Ann Althouse's name, a bell rings and an angel gets its wings.

On Friday night, TRex put up a post at the high-traffic blog Firedoglake exhorting his readers: "Please feel free to post your comments on this post under the name 'Ann Althouse'. I've done it before. It's totally fun." Some time thereafter, he took the post down, but I have the text of it because I've set up a Google alert to keep track of the use and abuse of my name, so I received the text in my email.

Savor that for a moment. She has her name on Bat Alert.

Let's move on.

I've known for a long time that unscrupulous webwriters appropriate my name, and I have a longstanding dispute with the blog Sadly, No for refusing to take down comments that appropriate my name. I have emailed them politely and seriously making the request, but they have refused repeatedly.Now, I have TRex's confession that he is one of my impersonators. I don't know that he is an impersonator on Sadly, No, but the post he took down mentioned Sadly, No.

An amusing man who refers to himself as a dinosaur refuses to take her seriously. Really? And he impersonates her, stealing her good name to make snarky comments that people might think actually came from her! And if it weren't for the fact that anyone who ran their cursor over "Homepage" would know who he was, just like with the comments on Sadly, No, he would have been this close to getting away with it too.